Man’s Best Friend Really Can Read Your Emotions

The study may not come as a surprise to canine lovers, who sometimes swear by their pets’ ability to understand them and empathize with them, but it may astonish others, who had come to believe that humans are the only species capable of perceiving and processing emotions. Also, the dogs involved in the study did not receive prior training. But while their loyalty is without question we have not always, necessarily, understood the somewhat mystical bond we have with dogs. In order to ensure that the dogs weren’t responding to something familiar, the voices of the humans were in a language the dog wasn’t familiar with and that was Brazilian Portuguese.

This, say scientists, shows they were combining what they could see and hear to evaluate the mood of the dog in the picture.

For the study, 17 adult dogs were used. They were domestic but not previously trained to detect emotions. Some people and researchers said that the dogs imitate the emotions of their owner, but a new study comes to say that they act like that because they feel the emotion of their owner, rather than copy it. The images were depicting both humans and dogs and were differentiated into two categories: positive and negative.

The photos of facial expressions could be paired with either a compatible sound, for example a happy face with a happy vocalisation, or incompatible, such as a happy face with an angry sound.

That dogs paid more attention to an image corresponding to an emotional sound from both humans and dogs suggests that dogs have an intuitive understanding of our emotions and what they mean.

So when you’re miserable and your dog jumps on the sofa to give you a snuggle, it’s not just good timing – they’re trying to comfort you.

A team of animal behaviour experts and psychologists the university and from the University of Sao Paulo, Brazil, found that dogs can recognise both positive and negative states. They do it using two senses: visual and auditory. Dogs understand basic emotions such as fear, anger, happiness and surprise, but more complex emotional states escape them.

This ability may be a “particularly advantageous” tool for a social species such as dogs and indicates a “high-level” cognitive power, according to the study.

All in all, our canine friends are really smart, and possess very complex skills, which help them notice if we’re angry or happy and therefore, they can react accordingly.